Biography Of Peter Cook
Page 17
In a celebrated article for The Observer, entitled Can English Satire Draw Blood?, Jonathan Miller directly attacked the production of the Kenneth Williams revues, complaining that ‘The bony outlines of Peter’s contributions were softened by their gay commercial setting. Tinselly dance routines, a-fidget with glow paint and fishnet would follow one of his dour, screwy little numbers and promptly erase it from the mind of the audience.’33 The howls of protest coming from the Duke of York’s were no more than the sound of people who’d backed the wrong horse. Miller was firmly behind the right horse. Peter had managed to back both horses and still turn a profit.
It would have taken a brilliant sociologist to have predicted it, but Britain was ready for the shift to Beyond the Fringe. Ten years of Conservative government had never really been questioned. The fear of nuclear war was magnified among teenagers facing national service in the wake of the Suez fiasco. The wave of patriotism unleashed by victory in the Second World War had receded. The new generation could only view the war at second-hand on second-rate celluloid; and the war had been the principal, if not the only reason to have felt proud to be British in the preceding sixteen years. Beyond the Fringe was the vanguard of a social trend, in which the first highly sceptical and aware generation of post-war-educated public schoolboys was unleashed into society. Their fearlessness came not from having surveyed a weakened political world and discovered themselves capable of mastering it, but had been instilled into them from birth by the very Establishment they now mocked, the Establishment they had been taught to assume command of in due course. It was not a revolution but a cultural coup d’état.
Within six months the word ‘satire’, used by some anonymous sub-editor to headline Tynan’s Observer piece, was the topic of conversation at every fashionable middle-class dinner table in Britain. A consumer demand for satire was actually created, which became known as the ‘satire boom’. Beyond the Fringe and Peter Cook in particular were widely regarded as the fount of all things satirical. Peter, relaxed with his amazing success, tended to allow such generalisations to flow over his head. Miller and Bennett, the two who had actually pushed the revue in a more satirical direction, tended to argue against being pigeonholed, and to attack the ‘satire boom’ as a journalistic construct. It was a debate that carried on right up to the night of Peter’s death, when Miller and John Bird argued on Newsnight about whether Peter had been a satirist or not; and beyond, to Chris Morris’s interjection in a Radio 4 documentary about Peter’s life that the whole question was entirely semantic and therefore irrelevant.
One thing the cast of Beyond the Fringe was always keen to emphasise was that they had never set out to be satirical. ‘We just wrote about the things that amused or annoyed us,’ said Peter.34 As a result, the satire label was slightly irritating. Bennett rather modestly contends that ‘I imagine various people were doing similar sketches around the same time, and it has always seemed to me that what was subsequently labelled “satire” was simply this kind of private humour going public.’35 Miller agrees that ‘None of us approached the world with a satirical indignation. What made the show work was that we resolved not to make these conditional propositions, which were always the basis of old-fashioned revue – “Wouldn’t it be funny if . . .” Our idea was “Isn’t it funny that . . .” – let’s observe what actually goes on. We didn’t think it was a revolution. It was only when Kenneth Tynan shoved this banner into our hands – it was rather like Charlie Chaplin finding himself at the head of a communist parade.’36 As for the notion that Peter was the most satirical of the lot, Miller snorts with derision. ‘The idea that he had an anarchic, subversive view of society is complete nonsense. He was the most upstanding, traditional upholder of everything English and everything Establishment.’37 Bennett concurs: ‘He wasn’t interested in satire at all. He was interested in being funny.’38 Miller laments: ‘We’ve been lumbered [with the satire tag] ever since. Having gone off and done something else, they say, “Oh, the old satirical verve has gone, I see. The revolutionaries have certainly found themselves very comfortable houses to live in. The young Fringers have gone soft.” We were soft from the very start. We’d always lived in houses like that.’39
It’s certainly true that Beyond the Fringe did not put its case from a left-wing perspective. Right from the start, some reviewers had drawn their readers’ attention to this apparent contradiction. Tynan, himself a committed socialist, had raised the sole objection that the show was ‘anti-reactionary without being progressive’.40 Harold Hobson, writing in the same day’s Sunday Times, pointed out that it was ‘an entertainment founded in [the cast’s] conviction of their natural superiority to all that they discuss, attack or caricature. The close attention which I invariably give to frivolous entertainments did not reveal to me any political principle.’41 But if there had been no satirical or political intent, that is not to say there was little satirical or political effect. The Fringers may have set out to write only about the things that amused or annoyed them, but what is satire if not the holding up of folly and vice to public ridicule? Two principal types of comic character dominated Peter’s well-stocked repertoire, the lonely obsessive bore and the powerful but pompous halfwit. The latter variant especially was derived from close observation of the class that had reared him. Of course he did not wish to overthrow his own kind, but merely by laughing at the foolish and the morally corrupt among their number, he had succeeded in exposing his own kind to satirical attack.
Bird’s argument was more technical than sociological: ‘A satirist is what Peter was . . . Northrop Frye wrote of satire that “It demands (at least a token) fantasy, a content recognised as grotesque, moral judgments (at least implicit), and a militant attitude to experience”. Its distinguishing mark is the “double focus of morality and fantasy”. Cook wouldn’t easily have forgien me for calling up this academic artillery barrage, but those phrases perfectly describe the way his humour worked.’ The sketch – and the actual joke – that Bird and Miller chose as their battleground after Peter’s death was a piece of nonsense about the Great Train Robbery written for the show’s American tour, in which Peter – as Sir Arthur Gappy, a Streeb-Greebling variant and senior policeman – explained that Scotland Yard had built up an Identikit picture which closely resembled the Archbishop of Canterbury:
Interviewer:
So His Grace is your number one suspect?
Sir Arthur:
Well, let me put it this way – His Grace is the man we are currently beating the living daylights out of down at the Yard.
Interviewer:
And he is still your number one suspect?
Sir Arthur:
No, I’m happy to say that the Archbishop, God bless him, no longer resembles the picture we built up.
The punchline was a satirical attack on police brutality, argued Bird. Just a joke, said Miller, ‘a piece of inspired lunacy – I don’t think Peter was the slightest bit interested in police brutality.’42 Perhaps the latter in intent, in inspiration, and the former, quite knowingly, in effect.
It is worth noting what Peter himself said at the time, when asked by the Sunday Pictorial to define his own political perspective. ‘I’m a young reformer’, he replied, and suggested that he might vote Labour at the next election (although he later claimed that he hadn’t done so). ‘People at the top make out that they know everything. What pompous rubbish. Just because a bloke becomes Foreign Secretary he doesn’t stop making mistakes. But most people think that because he’s got the job he must know more than anyone. The Government and Establishment dismiss the population with a combination of arrogance and disdain. My main aim is to try to get the public treated like rational human beings.’43 The youthful enthusiasm inherent in that manifesto is probably just a reflection of the misleadingly hea atmosphere of potential change that prevailed in the wake of Beyond the Fringe. What is more significant is that, insofar as Peter wished to change things, it was from a moral rather than a political perspective.
The moral element that informed his humour sometimes led him down a politically satirical path. It may be oversimplifying matters to describe him as a satirist. He was definitely not a born satirist. But he achieved satire. And he certainly had it thrust upon him, a banner that he was happy to carry for a while.
Satirist or not, irrelevant semantic debate or not, the spring of 1961 and Beyond the Fringe marked a turning point in the attitude of the British public to its leaders. Henceforth politicians would be treated with far more scepticism and far less respect. No longer would they be free to address the voters – in Russell Davies’s memorable phrase – ‘as if they were a convocation of servants below stairs.’ In other countries, such shifts have only ever occurred through the medium of wars and revolutions. How wonderful that in this country such seismic change could have been brought about by a comedy show.
Of course the traditional response of the British Establishment to criticism is to try to absorb its critics. Rab Butler, Iain Macleod and the Southern Rhodesian leader Sir Roy Welensky all came along to the Fortune; it was only a matter of time before Macmillan himself plucked up the courage to try and prove what a good sport he was, by turning up to see himself impersonated. The evening began well; but when Peter arrived on stage as Macmillan the Prime Minister’s smile froze into an unconvincing rictus. With deliberation, Peter pointed out the presence of their distinguished visitor. Sure enough, it was not long before he began to stray, unannounced, from the agreed script:
When I’ve a spare evening, there’s nothing I like better than to wander over to a theatre and sit there listening to a group of sappy, urgent, vibrant young satirists, with a stupid great grin spread all over my silly old face.
The audience fell silent, but Peter didn’t stop. He plunged on, more gleeful at his power to shock than disturbed by the absence of laughter.
By February 1962, when the show had been running for nine months and Bernard Cribbins had long been forced to settle for alternative accommodation, opposition MPs were getting laughs in the House of Commons by suggesting that it was Peter, not Macmillan, who had been defending the government on the TV news. On the 28th, the Queen herself came to the Fortune, flanked by the Earl of Home and the Lord Chamberlain. The management had asked Alan Bennett to delete the word ‘erection’ from one of his monologues, but according to Bennett, ‘I priggishly refused. I cringe to think of it today. I suppose I must be one of the few people who have said “erection” in front of the Queen.’44 Her Majesty openly roared with laughter at Peter’s Macmillan impersonation. ‘It proves we haven’t done our job properly,’45 said Jonathan Miller glumly.
Alec Cook finally got to see the show in London too, and was immensely proud of his son. He and his wife thought Beyond the Fringe was marvellous, althoughgaret too found Aftermyth of War unacceptable. Peter’s sisters were if anything even prouder: when night fell in Uplyme, Elizabeth would creep into her glamorous brother’s vacant bedroom and fall asleep on his bed. For Christmas, Peter gave Sarah a letter to Kiki Byrne, who ran a fashionable dress shop in the King’s Road, which read: ‘Please give my sister Sarah any dress she wants from your shop.’ ‘I remember slipping along icy pavements to find the shop. It was just the most brilliant, exciting thing for a country-reared teenager to go into this shop, clutching this magic piece of paper.’
Peter was now extremely well off. Although the cast were only receiving a tiny proportion of the box office takings, the peripheral rewards – financial and otherwise – were considerable. In August 1961 they signed to appear in a series of five-minute spots for the ITV arts magazine Tempo, at £125 a time. Dudley Moore even got his own jazz show on Southern Television, called Strictly for the Birds. Only the BBC, it seems, were still not interested. In 1962 The Observer offered Peter his own weekly satire page, which he wrote with Michael Frayn and Roger Law, called Almost the End. Law illustrated a regular topical cartoon strip scripted by Peter, one episode of which featured two bowler-hatted, pinstriped men complaining about modern theatre:
You know, I go to the theatre to be entertained. I don’t want to see plays about rape, sodomy and drug addiction. I can get all that at home.
The page was finally scrapped after a cartoon concerning the plight of a mental patient who had escaped, committed a robbery, had been declared sane as a result, had been imprisoned for life, and then flogged for further misdemeanours in prison. The Home Secretary Rab Butler was depicted walking in a summer field with his wife, declaring that the prisoner’s flogging was necessary because he had offended so regularly that ‘he must be off his head’. The Observer’s editor David Astor was so outraged at the inclusion of the Home Secretary’s wife that he abandoned the satire page altogether. It was probably a relief to Peter, who by now had taken on so much work that he was meeting Law to discuss the strip during car journeys from one place to another, recycling a lot of stage material and delivering his copy at midnight on deadline day, leaving Law to draw the illustrations overnight.
Also in 1962, Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe made contact and asked if Peter and Jonathan Miller would like to take part in a Beyond the Fringe-meets-The Goons project, to be recorded for commercial release. For the Radley boy who had feigned illness in order to press his ear to the sanatorium radio so many times, this was the ultimate thrill. Entitled Bridge over the River Wye, it was a direct parody of the River Kwai film starring Alec Guinness. Milligan was credited with writing the script, but the mere fact that one of the characters was called Brigadier Stutling-Drobe indicates that Peter too made a contribution. Peter also introduced the record:
It was 1962 in England, but still 1943 in Japan, such was the difference in teeth between these two great religions.
Sellers played the Alec Guinness character, who forbade his men to escape into the jungle, while Miller portrayed William Holden’s single-minded American:
Holden:
One of the men has already planned to make a break, sir.
Guinness:
Is he mad?
Holden:
He has a certificate, sir.
Guinness:
It means certain death.
Holden:
It is a death certificate, sir.
Spike Milligan, meanwhile, cast himself as the Japanese Camp Commandant:
Commandant:
Must – not – lose – face!
Guinness:
I think you could well afford to lose that one.
Peter Sellers, who remembered the young student he’d met at the Duke of Bedford’s bash, had already been acting as a sort of roving ambassador for Beyond the Fringe, persuading as many of his high-profile friends as he could to go and see it.
There were other obvious rewards for being one of the stars of the most celebrated show in the West End. Dudley Moore, who craved the company of the opposite sex even more than Peter did, made up for all those years as a club-footed outcast with a string of love affairs. Peter later admitted to being jealous of the number of women who swarmed around his diminutive colleague: ‘Women, at least in those days, did have this opinion that these magic fingers, if they could weave such magic on the keyboard . . . “Would that they could tickle over my bits.” It seemed an easy way of pulling birds.’46 Eventually Moore, who had also been busy writing the music for two other stage shows, collapsed with exhaustion, and had to be replaced in Beyond the Fringe for three weeks by Robin Ray. He flew to Positano to recuperate. Just before he was about to board the plane he encountered John Gielgud, who recognised him and insisted on giving him a letter of introduction to his friends Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, who lived in Italy. Once aboard the aircraft, Moore opened it himself and read: ‘Darling Lilli, This will introduce you to the brilliant young pianist from Beyond The Fringe – Stanley Moon.’ Peter loved this story and often called his friend Stanley Moon thereafter. When he wrote the script for the film Bedazzled, that was the name he gave to the thinly-disguised Dudley Moore character.
One of Dudley’s rel
ationships was with Anna Leroy, a chorus girl from Donald Albery’s production of Oliver!, whom he would meet discreetly in the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden. Her chaperone was Ron Moody’s understudy Barry Humphries, the future Dame Edna Everage. Humphries remembers his first sight of Peter Cook in the bar: ‘An incredibly thin aquiline figure, constantly throwing back his forelock, exhibiting his profile, rather nattily turned out in a mohair suit, and quite feminine. There was nothing effeminate about Peter, but he was feminine, which is possibly the reason why so many men seemed to have crushes on him. Most of the people who worked with him had gigantic crushes on Peter Cook, and it was not difficult to see why. He was an immensely attractive figure. He was somewhat unapproachable though – he’d adopted a mocking manner, which I saw later to be a disguise for a person who was in fact quite shy.’
One crush which Peter reciprocated came from Judy Huxtable, a debutante-turned-actress from the south-west who had signed on with Willie Donaldson. She was mesmerised by his performance in Beyond the Fringe: ‘With those daddy long legs and arc-lamp eyes he was by far the most brilliant and good looking. I can remember sitting there watching these brilliant young men poking fun at politicians, with my father sitting beside me harrumphing and saying “Absolute nonsense!”’47 When they met, Peter in turn was knocked out by her slender beauty and her silly sense of humour. She was, according to Willie Donaldson, ‘Ridiculously pretty, very shy, very timid, doll-like pretty, almost too pretty.’ Peter decided to woo her in earnest. His old Pembroke friend Tim Coghlan, who lived in the flat above hers in Exhibition Road, remembers his eager pursuit.